CompTIA Blog

Protecting bare drives is imperative while storing and transporting digital data as spills and falls could be catastrophic to a hard drive. CRU-DataPort has redesigned and improved its anti-static drive case for bare 3.5" hard drives and 2.5” notebook drives. CRU-Dataport was one of 160 vendors showcasing their solutions to help VARs grow their business at Breakaway.DriveBoxes add minimal height to a drive making them more compact to steadily store on a shelf and archive data or access files. CR ...

At Breakaway this week in Washington, D.C, more than 160 vendors showed their latest and greatest to 1,000 key industry players.  In our series of posts covering what’s new, check out these six vendors and how they can help solution providers grow their businesses.Calyptix Security released its Beta version of its “Single Pane of Glass” management platform, dubbed SPS v1.0, at Breakaway.  The SPS will provide a platform for IT professionals and managed service providers to centrally manage all n ...

There are myriad opportunities for partnering in the telecommunications and cloud services space, and global IT vendors are eager to do so.Seventy percent of vendors surveyed by Amazon Consulting said telecom service providers were “very strategic” to their 2011 indirect channel go-to-market plan. Beth Vanni, Amazon Consulting vice president, presented results from the survey of 64 global IT vendors at a Breakaway session on Wednesday.Sixteen percent of the vendors were “still formulating a stra ...

The market for mobile devices and applications is a 21st century version of the Wild West where technology solution providers can strike it rich by bringing law and order to the technology frontier.“There are not a lot of standards,” Bill Taylor, president, Panasonic Systems Networks Company of America, said during a mobility trends industry panel discussion Wednesday at CompTIA Breakaway 2011. “You’ve got this Wild West of multipurpose devices.”What’s needed, especially by business users, is so ...

Lester Keizer offers this perspective to MSPs, “If you don’t have a business continuity/disaster recovery plan you can share with clients, you are doing them a disservice that borders on unethical.”Keizer, CEO of Business Continuity Technologies, led today’s “Business Continuity Planning: The Top IT Priority for 2011” session at Breakaway 2011.  The program was the winner of the Attendee-Voted Breakaway Wildcard Session – and with good reason.  Events during the last decade – such as the Septemb ...

The IT solution provider companies best positioned for future success are the ones that take a hybrid approach to customers, combining traditional product sales and support with new offerings in managed services, cloud computing and customized application development.That’s the collective view of four IT industry analysts who spoke Wednesday at CompTIA Breakaway 2011.“We believe the hybrid model will be here for the next 10 to 15 years, a combination of on-premise equipment with elements of clou ...

A common them cut across today’s panel discussion “Business Operations Challenges: What’s Keeping Solutions Providers Up at Night?” at Breakaway 2011: Expectation Management.  Panelist responses to questions from moderator Regina Ciardiello, managing editor, SMB Nation, were laced with the consistent message “manage expectations before expectations manage you.”Vetting vendors for partnerships?  Manage expectations, said panelist Ilene Rosoff, CEO and president, The Launch Pad.  “We approach vend ...

Understanding a medical practice’s workflow is critical to selling healthcare IT solutions. That takes a combination of research, good listening skills and practice, Patrick Wilson of Vital Signs Technology told a group of Breakaway attendees in a Wednesday session. “You’re not going to have a single product that works for all entities,” he said. “It’s in the subtle details. You have to listen and figure out what is unique to their practice.” By unde ...

IT solution providers would be wise to leave discussions about bits, bytes, speeds and feeds at the front door and instead engage customers in conversations on how to solve business challenges, executive from four top IT vendors advised Breakaway 2011 attendees.“The money is in understanding the domain the end-user is living in,” said Mike deVente, vice president, North America channels, Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions. “What are they trying to accomplish? Bring the solution to the proble ...

Small and medium-sized businesses pay attention. State and local governments are expected to spend $61.5 billion on IT by 2015. Federal regulation FAR19.201 mandates that SMBs get government contracts. Last year $96 billion was available in governmental contracts. However, only one percent of SMBs got the contracts and got them repeatedly, explained Dick Idtensohn, senior partner of BDW-L LLC, to an audience of IT solution providers at Breakaway. Those SMBs “understand and work the system”. ...

What will a solution provider business model look like in the next three to five years? That’s the question a panel of industry professionals addressed during an interactive discussion on Day Two of Breakaway. Moderated by Ryan Morris, principal consultant at Morris Management Consultants, the group took on a number of topics relating to the increasing solution needs of clients, the advancements in technology and the ever-increasing demands on IT business owners.Session panelists included: Rob B ...

The old line about “what you do when you assume” is alive and well in the business world, at least in the view of noted business consultant and best-selling author Peter Sheahan.During yesterday’s opening keynote speech at Breakaway 2011, Sheahan said the biggest obstacles in the selling process are often wrong assumptions made by sellers.“It’s often not the buyer getting in the way of the seller exploiting the opportunity, but the seller not fully understanding the opportunity,” said Sheahan, f ...

In yesterday’s Distributor Power Panel moderated by Gennifer Biggs, editor, Business Solutions, at Breakaway, a panel of top distributors advised solution providers to pick up the phone and get to know their distributor representatives one-on-one.“Be a little transparent.  Be open and frank and help us understand your business,” said Greg Dixon, CTO of ScanSource.  “Most of our customers are small with as few as five employees.  You should be a on a first-name basis with your rep.”Some smaller s ...

Technology vendors are announcing new products, services and partnerships at CompTIA Breakaway this week. A few of the noteworthy items:eGestalt Technologies announced version 11 of its award-winning security and compliance management solution that provides PCI and HIPAA/HITECH-based security and risk assessment, auditing and remediation. The tool offers peace of mind to channel partners servicing SMBs to large enterprises, including medical providers and their business associates, retailers and ...

CompTIA President CEO Todd Thibodeaux kicked off Breakaway 2011 yesterday morning saying, “We’ve lined up our most robust slate of content and training for all of you, so that you can truly accelerate your business.” He wasn’t exaggerating, and the workshops starting shortly after morning keynotes concluded backed him up.I headed for the “Cloud Business Development Workshop” early.  Good thing. The session was SRO – Standing Room Only.So many VARs wanted to attend the workshop that the afternoon ...